A group of anthropologists says it finally knows how iconic early human ancestor Lucy died — and other researchers are livid

Lucy, the iconic hominin found in present-day Ethiopia, died 3.18
million years ago. Her cause of death has remained a mystery
since her remains were discovered in 1974.

But a new study
published Monday in the journal Nature claims to pin down,
for the first time, precisely how and why Lucy died. According to
the study's authors, she fell from a tree.

Some other anthropologists, including Tim D.
White, whose findings of ancient hominin remains in Africa
helped illuminate the early stages of human evolution, aren't
quite sold.

In fact, they're pretty convinced that the paper is utterly
wrong.

White says the cracks in Lucy's bones, rather than the result of
a fall while she was alive, instead emerged long after she passed
away — something that happens to thousands of bones that get
buried and shuffled around in the Earth's soil for millions of
years.

"This may be the first time that such routine fossil damage has
been interpreted as evidence of tree dwelling and death by
falling," White told Business Insider.

"For good reason. If paleontologists were to apply the same logic
and assertion to the many mammals whose fossilized bones have
been distorted by geological forces, we would have everything
from gazelles to hippos, rhinos, and elephants climbing and
falling from high trees."

The problem appears to have been pretty straightforward, White
said: The study authors must have failed to look at the other
fossils at the site.

"These authors make no effort to test the alternative hypothesis
that these cracks and other breaks were made during the processes
of fossilization and erosion," White said.

Instead, they went straight to the clinical literature for an
example of what the break would have looked like in a person, he
said.

"When you go to the clinical literature for your analogy ...
you're confined to a single cause, because we know what happens
when humans fall off the top of buildings or fall from windows,"
William
Kimbel, the director of the Institute of Human Origins at
Arizona State University, told Business Insider. "There's only
one explanation: breakage due to trauma."

And that's almost certainly not what happened to Lucy, Kimbel
said.

"I've worked in Eastern Africa for a long time and at fossil
sites ... like the one where Lucy is from, for a long time,"
Kimbel told Business Insider. "And I know from my own experience
that the type of damage that Lucy's bones exhibit is extremely
common in animals that range from hare to hippo. It is
ubiquitous. We would not interpret that hares and hippos are
falling out of trees."

John
Kappelman, the study's lead author and a professor of
anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, told Business
Insider that his team did in fact look at plenty of other bones
at the site.

But since most fossils get cracked as the result of fossilization
and erosion, White said "the authors' obligation was to
unequivocally demonstrate that the cracks in the bones were made
around the time of death rather than during fossilization."

So we put the question to Kappelman, and asked if he'd indeed
tested that alternative hypothesis — that these breaks were made
as the fossil got rustled around in the soil instead of by a
fall. "Thirty-some years of working in this field has done that
for us," he said.

He agreed that the majority of the breaks in Lucy's skeleton
happened as the result of regular fossilization and erosion. "The
easy criticism is to say, 'Oh, other fossils look like this.' We
agree. We put that straight up in the paper," Kappelman said.

But he and his team chose to home in on one "specific kind of
break," Kappelman said. "These are the kinds of breaks that are
documented in the clinical literature, and what they are is a
high-energy break."

Kappelman added: "We're not saying that these breaks couldn't
have happened through fossilization, but we looked at these and
we said, 'We think they deserve an explanation.'"